Recently in Corporate / Enterprise Category

SixApart have announced that Chris Alden is the new Chairman and CEO. Mena Trott makes a rare posting on her corporate blog about the move, and Chris also posts about the change on his blog. I met Chris at the beginning of the year, while I was at Headshift, and was impressed - and I think having someone who has developed and innovated in the blogging space can only be good for SixApart. GigaOm and TechCrunch also have the announcement, and you can follow any reaction on Techmeme. [tags]SixApart, Movable Type, MovableType[/tags]

Jeffrey Walker, the President of Atlassian Software, wonders if Razorfish should have started with MediaWiki as the base for their new enterprise wiki.

It strikes me that if Razorfish invested all this effort and money, then the question needs to be asked: Is Mediawiki an enterprise wiki? Certainly not out of the box. One full-time intern and two part-time developers is at least $50-100K for one year! Probably the latter number. Mediawiki in this instance became an enterprise wiki but only after considerable work.

Shiv Singh, Razorfish's Enterprise Solutions lead, responds:

... Our wiki did not take a full year to build and the part-time developers were bench resources. In other words, it did not cost us $100,000 as Jeffery implied. Furthermore, enterprise 2.0 as coined by Andrew McFee is not about cost but about what the software does for its users and how they shape the software themselves.

I commented on his blog, but thought I'd post here as well:

Shiv - not sure I agree with you... I think you're lucky (or unlucky) in having bench resource available - a lot of companies aren't in that situation and have a constant battle to get developer time. So, faced with that situation - what is the cost of having 2 developers available, part time, to develop and look after your mediawiki instance over 18 months ? Secondly, would spending the relatively small amount on an unlimited license for Confluence ($8,000) or Socialtext, and getting out of the box AD integration, search and granular permissioning, represent better value than developing it from scratch ? Also, developing inhouse commits you to a codebase that with an audience of just yourselves (until you release it out to the community ?).

I should disclose that the company I work for - Headshift - does a lot of work with Confluence. [tags]confluence, atlassian, wiki, mediawiki, socialsoftware, enterprise, enterprise2.0 [/tags]

Missed this the first time around - a podcasted interview from ETech with Lee Bryant talking about some of the philosophy of the Headshift approach. Good stuff. [tags]headshift, podcast, social[/tags]

Boy - does this ever ring true.

I think we make a big mistake when we use terms like counterculture and rebel and deviant loosely. They've had it as terms. Defunct. Finito. Past their sell-by-date.Because every time we do that, we paint a big red X across the backs of the people we so describe and put the firm's immune system on full alert. And the rebels are toast. Which is often a shame. Because they weren't rebels. Or deviants. Or counterculture whatevers. They were doing their job. Trying to find a better way of doing things. [In a strange way, I think that Malcolm's feeling for consultants is related. When a "consultant" finds a better way of doing things firms roll out the green carpet, papered with spondulicks; when someone in the organisation quietly does the same thing, he's a deviant…]

Confused Of Calcutta » Blog Archive » On rebels and deviants and counterculturals

Although I'm not sure it's even about explicit labelling - which at least gives you (being the rebel in question) something tangible to tangle with. Implicit labelling is probably even more pernicious and, as there's nothing overt, harder to fight against. [tags]internal, corporate, culture[/tags]

Shiv Singh from Razorfish announces that the Razorfish report on intranets has been wikified and is available at The Intranet Maturity Framework. Nice idea, we'll see how it plays out, and whether a better report comes out of it. I'm also interested to see how the rights (and credit) issue gets played out. I've suggested they clarify terms by adding a Creative Commons license - which in itself might be an internally controversial idea. Haven't really read the report, but I did notice that it looks as if Razorfish have got a big downer on internal blogging:

Some employee blogs will last, but, unfortunately, most won't. Many companies that enthusiastically set up employee blogs ignored the two most important ingredients for blogging success. The first is that the blogger needs to have something important and unique to say. According to a recent survey by America Online, the most popular blogs are the most personal and opinionated ones. Most organizations have cultures that subconsciously encourage information hoarding and group think. These organizations will find that their employees are reluctant to share their knowledge and personal insights unless they see tangible benefits to doing so. As a result, most employee blogs will be superficial and boring unless, of course, they are anonymous.

The AOL survey was about external blogs. We're discussing internal use here. Apples vs Oranges ? I think so. I agree there will be many cultural issues (and frankly, the companies with those sorts of cultures probably won't even green light a company wide blogging infrastructure), but a blanket prediction of most internal blogs failing is, I think, a pretty big leap. And finally - could I have chosen a worse title for this post ? [tags]internal, corporate, razorfish, wiki, blogs, intranet[/tags]

Thomas Otter - SAP

I once worked on a project at a Railway, and they had different pay rates depending on whether the train route was mainly uphill or downhill. This sounds really dumb, but if you think back to when trains ran on coal and steam, uphill meant much harder work for the stoker and the driver. This rule became enshrined in the union structured plans, and because there were still several 100 guys still on this form of contract, we needed to set this up in the system. Real life business is not all about knowledge workers and clouds and tags, but really complex, messy and often illogical business processes.

Something I need to keep reminding myself ! [tags]web20, enterprise, corporate[/tags]